The stage in our name.
Found before it's truly begun — it's only caught when someone goes looking. Quick to treat, and nearly everyone is fine. Now click stage IV — that's the other end of this line.
A new kind of employee benefit
Too many cancers are caught late. We make sure your workforce gets checked early.
Stage Zero figures out who in your workforce needs which cancer screening — then helps each person actually get it done.
Your people keep their own doctors and their own health plan. We just make sure each person gets the cancer checks that are right for them.
Try it live
Or start from a typical workforce:
Each dot ≈ 10 employees
—likely elevated risk — may qualify for enhanced screening
—likely overdue for a recommended screening
—expected new cancer diagnoses per year
Potential cost of catching these late
if earlier detection shifts these diagnoses from late to early stage
—
How is this calculated?
Directional estimates from published incidence and screening-adherence patterns, for illustration only. The cost figure is an upper-bound illustration — it applies a peer-reviewed late-vs-early first-year treatment-cost difference (~$25k–$50k per case, varying by cancer type; Reddy et al., Curr Med Res Opin 2022) to the expected annual diagnoses, and assumes earlier detection on each; real impact depends on how many diagnoses actually shift stage. Actual stratification runs validated clinical models (Gail/BCRAT, Tyrer-Cuzick, BOADICEA, PLCO) on real assessments — not averages.
The problem
Cancer is your largest health cost — and most of that cost comes from finding it late.
Employers see the spend after a diagnosis. The two questions that decide that spend — who's at elevated risk, and who's overdue for screening — mostly go unasked, so risk stays invisible until the claim arrives. The problem, in three numbers:
1 in 2
employers rank cancer the #1 driver of their healthcare costs; 86% rank it top-three.
Business Group on Health, 2024 Large Employer Health Care Strategy Survey
>40%
of employer stop-loss spend comes from cancer (solid tumors) — the leading driver of the $1M+ claimants that spike a renewal.
Sun Life High-Cost Claims report, 2025
14%
is how many cancers are actually caught by a recommended screening test. The rest show up as symptoms — usually later, and costlier.
NORC at the University of Chicago, Percent of Cancers Detected by Screening, 2022
Why stage is everything
One variable decides the whole story.
Survival, treatment intensity, time away from work, cost — all of it keys off the stage cancer is found at. Move the marker to see how much.
The five stages — and what each one costs
Select a stage
≈100%
still alive five years later
Lowest
cost to treat
Survival: SEER five-year relative survival, female breast cancer, by stage at diagnosis (SEER 21, 2016–2022) — localized ~100%, regional ~88%, distant ~34%; stage II spans the localized/regional categories. Cost: first-year treatment of stage IV disease runs up to 7.7× stage I across 17 cancers (Reddy et al., Curr Med Res Opin 2022, SEER-Medicare). Illustrative; outcomes vary by cancer type and individual. Stage Zero provides screening navigation, not treatment.
How it works
Three steps. No clinic build-out. No replacement of anything you have.
Catching cancer earlier doesn't take building a cancer center. It takes knowing who's at risk — and making the screening actually happen.
1
Find who's at risk
A short, clinically structured assessment plus validated risk models show who's at elevated risk — and who's overdue for a screening.
2
Get them screened
Each person gets an individual plan and a real human who helps them book the right test — through their existing doctors and network.
3
Show it worked
We track completions, escalate care gaps, and give HR and brokers de-identified, audit-ready reporting.
How we're different
We're not reinventing cancer screening. We're making it finally happen.
The science of catching cancer early has existed for decades. What's broken is delivery: most people are never told which screenings fit their risk, and nobody follows up. That's the part we fix — proactively, for every employee, through the doctors they already have.
Guideline-concordant
Every recommendation follows USPSTF, NCCN, and American Cancer Society guidelines — deterministic, auditable clinical logic.
Validated risk models
Peer-reviewed, prospectively validated models (Gail/BCRAT, Tyrer-Cuzick, BOADICEA, PLCO) — published science, not a black box.
Evidence, not adjectives
No invented ROI multiples. As deployments mature, we publish first-party metrics — and label projections as projections.
Where we fit
Upstream of everything else in your cancer strategy.
Virtual cancer clinics bring their own medical teams and deliver care — from screening through treatment. That's powerful, but it's a big program to add. Stage Zero is deliberately lighter: we don't deliver care. We make sure your people get screened by the doctors they already have.
| Stage Zero | Virtual cancer clinics | General navigation platforms | |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | A screening layer — risk assessment and navigation only | A full clinical program, screening through treatment and survivorship | Broad benefits routing across many conditions |
| Who provides care | Your people's existing doctors — we never deliver care | The vendor's own medical group, alongside local providers | Existing providers; support is call-in |
| What changes for employees | Nothing — same doctors, same plan | A new clinical relationship with the vendor's care team | A new phone line or app |
| Deployment | Weeks — eligibility file and launch comms | A larger clinical implementation | Months; broad integration scope |
| HRSA navigation requirement | Purpose-built for it | Addressed within a much larger program | Generalist; not the core motion |
| Best fit when… | You want screening rates up without adding a new care channel | You want a full oncology program, including treatment support | You want one vendor across many conditions |
Reflects typical category positioning. Bring any specific vendor to a demo and we'll map the comparison line by line — including where they're strong.
In effect now
It also closes a live compliance gap.
Health plans must now cover individualized navigation for breast and cervical cancer screening under HRSA's updated preventive-services guidelines. Most plans attested to it — far fewer can show it's being delivered.
Who we serve
Built for the people who own the decision.
Employers & HR leaders
Get ahead of your largest cost category with a layer that gives every employee a risk profile — and turns screening from something nobody tracks into a number you can report on at renewal.
For employers →Benefits consultants & brokers
Bring clients a guideline-grounded answer on cancer strategy and the HRSA navigation requirement — one that rides on the benefits network they already have, not another platform to integrate.
For consultants →
Why we built this
"Every cancer story I've heard has the same first chapter: nobody saw it coming. We started Stage Zero, as a public benefit company, because that first chapter — who gets found early — is the one part a benefits program can actually rewrite."
Talk to us
See what this looks like on your real numbers.
A 30-minute demo: how we find who's at risk, what it looks like for your members, and what reporting you'd receive.
Thanks — request received. A member of our team will reach out within one business day.